Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.

The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.

"At the heart of the scheme is a false representation that consumers can participate in a Google-sponsored program that will allow them to make hundreds of dollars a day working at home performing a simple task that requires no particular experience or qualifications," the search engine giant wrote in a 26-page claim filed in U.S. District Court in Utah.

The lawsuit names Nevada-based Pacific WebWorks and 50 other defendants referred to only as "Does 1 through 50."

Pacific WebWorks did not immediately return calls for comment from ABCNews.com. According to the Google claim, Pacific WebWorks operates a credit card processing site.

A major controversy about the efficacy of the antiviral agent Tamiflu in treating influenza has erupted in the online version of BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. A team from the prestigious Cochrane Review says that its analysis of published data about clinical trials of the drug, known generically as oseltamivir, shows that the drug is able to reduce the course of an influenza infection by a day but that they are unable to conclude that the drug is effective at reducing complications and hospitalizations caused by flu because they do not have access to key data from eight clinical trials sponsored by the drug's manufacturer, Roche Laboratories Inc.

Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community.

In the case of Obama's government in particular, every criticism against Israel made by a potential government appointee has become a catalyst for debate about whether appointing "another leftist" offers proof that Obama does not truly support Israel.

A heavy police presence could be seen at a number of the potential targets, and police helicopters could be seen moving across various parts of the city.

One particular event cast a sickening pall over the entire year, and in doing so reminded us that our world became ever more violent and perverse in 2009. Although this event itself ended in January, its fallout continued and will be felt for years to come. I am referring, of course, to “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s attempted liquidation of the Gaza ghetto. The event is significant not only because it was premeditated slaughter, but also because it did incalculable damage did to Israel’s propaganda industry.

The House has rejected an effort to expand a Wall Street regulation bill with mortgage relief that would let debt-ridden homeowners reduce their payments in bankruptcy court. The vote was 241-188 to reject.

The provision would have revived a previous bill that passed the House but later failed in the Senate.

Democrats hoped that by inserting the provision in the regulatory legislation they would have had another opportunity to make it law. Aiding homeowners through bankruptcy had been a key feature of President Barack Obama's foreclosure fighting proposal, but the president did not push for it.

Banks and credit unions have lobbied against the bankruptcy measure. They say it would force a flood of bankruptcy filings and ultimately drive up mortgage rates.

The findings suggest that being male or female is not a permanently fixed state but something that has to be continually maintained in the adult body by the constant interaction of genes to keep the status quo – and the gender war – from slipping in favour of the opposite sex.

The Daily Beast has since learned that Headley’s connections to the Drug Enforcement Administration's murky intelligence unit - which I confirmed yesterday - might have played a role in his alleged conversion to terrorism. Additionally, sources at a foreign intelligence agency tell me that he might have been a double agent who turned on the U.S. [...] Indian intelligence believes that Headley was an undercover U.S. agent who went rogue. This theory goes that Headley was used by U.S. intelligence to infiltrate the Lashkar terrorists

In March, 2009 the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8405020.stm)

The number you won’t hear mentioned anywhere in the Mainstream Media: 327,729. That is how many people shifted to Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs in the last week alone, hitting an all time record high of 4.2 million!

Britain and America are seeking to cancel next year's parliamentary election in Afghanistan amid fears that it will distract from President Barack Obama's new strategy to bring security to the country.

The two allies are in dispute with European states over whether to fund and secure the elections in the spring or press for postponement until 2011, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

Those of us concerned with combating Climate Hate should take inspiration from the likes of the ADL and their vast experience in combating Holocaust denial. We must blacklist any scientist, educator, journalist and politician mentioning the slightest doubt in climate change or even suggesting that people should be free to doubt. We must make them unpublishable and unemployable. We must make them social lepers, to an extent that even their closest friends and family will not be associated with them. We must drag them through the courts wherever possible and make them rot in prison together with murderers and pedophiles. We must make anyone harboring Climate Change doubts be afraid of his own thoughts.

The nation's pre-eminent civil rights organization ACLU on Thursday slammed President Obama for shielding the Bush administration from accountability for its "dangerous torture policy," and insisted that this "lack of transparency" severely threatens the future of constitutional liberty in the United States.

"The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture," Jameel Jaffer, Director of ACLU's National Security Project, said in a conference call with reporters. "Now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

An article featured in Canada’s Financial Post newspaper calling for China’s draconian one child policy, where woman are kidnapped off the streets, drugged, and forced to undergo compulsory abortions, to be imposed worldwide has been met with widespread hostile reaction, yet such measures are being debated at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen.

But this is, or soon will be, 2010, and President Obama’s promises of transparency aside, the new way of doing things in the perpetual wartime economy is to pass bulky spending bills filled with anything and everything Congressmen want on an accelerated schedule, every few months.

The EU’s policy statement on a future Palestinian state now needs to be acted on, writes Khalid Amayreh from occupied Jerusalem

On October I met Sabia, his wife and children in Buritis, during my trip to countryside Rondonia. He can be seen in this photo, holding a Palestinian flag.

U.S. troops could be in Afghanistan for as many as 10 years at a cost of up to $300 billion and “thousands more American casualties,” according to the retired Army general who has penned a new independent report on challenges the military will face in the war.

But retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey concludes that the U.S. can, in the next five years, achieve three primary objectives: Create a viable Afghan security force that will allow for the reduction of an active U.S. combat role; create governance from the district level up that the population can support; and reduce official corruption by establishing a “parallel chain of financial custody and approval of resources” until the Afghan government is “operating unlike an active criminal enterprise.”

It didn’t take long for half of the United States to get slammed with snow (December 11, 2009), last year on December 11, 2008 the U.S. was only covered in 29% of snow. Next week will be even more snow-packed and temperatures even more miserable then last year.

The EU has warned that it will accompany the UN Security Council in punitive action should Iran fail to provide a 'clear response' over its nuclear work.

These next clips would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy that the internationalist criminal-scum elite are attempting to convert kids into this new “doomsday cult” and to fear the most unimaginable like huge floods, massive hurricanes and suicidal polar bears.

Poland and the United States on Friday signed an agreement on the status of US troops in the eastern European country ahead of the deployment of US Patriot missiles.

"This agreement allows the stationing of US soldiers and materiel in Poland," Polish Defence Minister Bogdan Klich told the press. "For Poland it means that its security will be strengthened."

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said the United States wants to deploy SM-3 missiles in Poland and the neighbouring Czech Republic in 2015.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, according to the Telegraph's Christopher Booker. Sceptics have long argued that there are other explanations for climate change other than man-made CO2 and here we look at some of the arguments put forward by those who believe that global warming is all a hoax.

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Frieden said that testing shows no genetic changes in the H1N1 virus, which he described as "really good news."

"It means that the vaccine that we have coming off the production line shortly is a very good match -- in fact, an excellent match...

The row between the rich countries and the developing world intensified at the Copenhagen summit, as China and its supporters blamed America for “endangering the world” by refusing to hand over more cash.

President Barack Obama had not even accepted his Nobel Prize in Oslo yesterday before environmental advocates began calling on him to earn it when he attends climate talks in Copenhagen next week.

“Obama, in part, has been awarded the Nobel Prize with the expectation that he will deliver the kind of leadership necessary to get a climate treaty,” Greenpeace USA’s Damon Moglen said on Dec. 9, a day before Obama won the same prestigious award given to Al Gore two years ago for his work on climate change. “He won it, and now is the time to earn it.”

Expanding access to low-cost prescription drugs from overseas might look like a sure winner in the effort to make health care more affordable. President Barack Obama has long supported the idea. So have many Democrats and a significant number of Republicans.

But the seemingly popular idea brought the Senate health care debate to a standstill Thursday, as Democrats divided over whether they should bow to the drug industry's fierce opposition.

Even the BBC didn't let this scoop get away.

A segment on the Dec. 3 broadcast of BBC's "Newsnight," showed the implications of the story behind the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal are more than just e-mails concealing data, but an incompetence analyzing the data by way of faulty computer code.

At issue was a proxy-temperature graph showing trends in temperatures for the preceding 1000 years. The first version of this graph, prepared initially by Keith Briffa, did show a significant decline in temperatures late in the twentieth century. The attendees at the IPCC meeting expressed, in no uncertain terms, their sentiment that this decline was an outlying result that ought to remain hidden, presumably from the broader scientific community and the public, in order to avoid what they feared would be a misconstruction of this decline.